This year for a birthday celebration 15 members of my family went on a tour of Hull-Oakes Lumber Mill (we like to think outside the box with birthday parties – just go with it) located in a small valley’s end outside of Monroe near Bellfountain. Hull-Oakes was, until very recently when it switched to electrical operations, one of the last steam-powered mills in the country, and going on a tour there is like stepping back in time: think Ken Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion. Our boisterous bunch was led through the Mill, watching as a hefty log, fresh off of the truck, was plopped into the mill pond and loaded onto the debarker tracks. We walked alongside this giant log as it rolled through the mill, expertly manipulated and processed by the crew. From timber to finished lumber, marked and ready for transport to San Francisco where it was being used in the framing of a new bridge. This is routine, day-in and day-out operations for the Hull-Oakes crew, but for us it was eye-opening to see the backstory behind the lumber that we use in our daily lives. Now, Hull-Oakes is certainly a different experience than going on a Weyerhauser tour, but the mechanics behind the processing of lumber produces the same ‘aha’ moment. My family is not naive to this world – we all grew up in a rural environment where logging is a part of everyone’s daily life. With most of the hillsides of the Mohawk Valley owned by Weyerhauser, BLM, or private woodland owners, the landscape is constantly in flux, and you mark years of your life by harvest rotations. However, most of us hadn’t witnessed first-hand what happens next after the log truck disappears down the road, and let me tell you: it was fascinating.

At Bald Hill Farm with our restoration project underway to enhance forest health, we are sending off our own logs to local mills, and thought it might be fun to give you a glimpse into the future that awaits these logs. Heck, you might even buy one to use as flooring in your kitchen one of these days!

1. First off, the loggers contracting on this project are A1 Logging out of Yamhill County. With a history of working on forest restoration projects on protected lands, including Baskett Slough National Wildlife Refuge, A1 also has the unique experience of working with oak, as well as specialized equipment to help minimize erosion and nimbly select smaller trees for removal.
2. Trout Mountain Forestry is our forestry consultant, working directly with the loggers and on-site nearly every day to ensure that our restoration vision is realized.
3. Larger oaks felled on the property will be heading to Zena Forest Products, a one-of-a-kind lumber mill located on protected land in the Eola Hills near Salem. Here the oak will be milled for specialty hardwood flooring and lumber for furniture and cabinet makers.
4. The larger conifer will be trucked a few short miles to Georgia Pacific in Philomath, and the smaller conifer logs to Weyerhauser in Sweet Home.
5. For those larger knotty logs, we’ll be setting them aside to assess their viability as stream improvement logs among streams and side channels at places like Harkens Lake near Monroe.
6. Several snags dot the restoration area, their grey trucks providing habitat and nesting sites for countless wildlife, and numerous downed logs lie on their sides, providing woody debris on the forest floor.
7. As we move into a clean-up phase on the forest we will also be chipping all of the remaining logs and branches – all of which will be re-distributed at the Farm for a wide variety of projects.

While it might not be as fun as seeing the logs actually travel from tree to lumber, I hope this gives you a glimpse into the cycle of life of the logs coming off of Bald Hill Farm through our woodland restoration efforts. It is also important to note that every $1 that we earn from log sales goes directly back into a Stewardship Fund for the property, helping us to continue to steward this community landscape for generations to come.

As the tour drew to a close, my uncles, cousins, aunt, sister, and parents all stood among the sunny gravel parking lot and looked back at the mill like it was a piece of fine art. “Better get out of here before the whistle blows“, yelled our guide, warning us of the elusive 4pm Bellfountain traffic jam as the workers rush homeward on the single road out of the mill. We snapped to and departed, carrying with us a deeper respect and appreciation for the journey these logs travel, from tree to lumber.

McDonald family on a tour of Hull-Oakes Mill, 2015

Jeff Baker (Stewardship Manager) and Claire Fiegener (Conservation Director) at Bald Hill Farm, looking at oak logs ready for shipping to Zena Forest Products. 2015

We don’t seem to know exactly how water originated on earth.  Some scientists suggest that extraplanetary sources (comets, meteoroids etc) might have brought water to the earth’s oceans.  More recent data indicates that water was likely present during the early formation of earth or approximately 4.8 billion years ago.  When the planet’s surface cooled some 3.8 billion years ago, the gaseous form of water condensed into rain to form the oceans.  So earth was borne as a wet planet.  Regardless of fully knowing its origin, without water, life would not exist on earth.  Our body is mostly water (60-65%).  Our blood is over 80% water, our brains and heart about 73%, our skin 64%, and our muscles are 79% water.  My son at his birth was 78% water.  When I look out my office window at the Willamette River during a beautiful spring or summer day at the Willamette River and wish that I was kayaking downstream towards Albany, perhaps that wish is somewhat driven by the fact that I am mostly water and the longing to be on the river is just a natural inclination to join with all the other H₂O molecules rushing down the river channel.

We mostly think about water when we don’t have it.  I have never been without access to water for any great periods of time.  On a few foolish occasions I neglected to carry water, and a desire to find it quickly rose in importance. During a late fall car camping trip in the Virginia Appalachians in my early twenties, the water at the remote camp ground was shut off for the season, and we had forgotten to carry water so my girlfriend and I drank warm Doctor Pepper sodas for a day or so until we decided to flee the camp ground to find water.  On a backpacking trip near Glacier Peak in Washington, I had the great idea that we could lighten our loads by dumping most of our water because I thought for sure that there would be many opportunities to find streams along the route.  A six hour uphill climb without finding much water did not start the journey out very well.

Human civilization, regardless of whether we were hunter-gatherers or settled agriculturists or urban dwellers, has depended on the availability of water.  However, the evolution of human societies into densely populated, permanent settlements fundamentally changed our relationship with water particularly with the need to irrigate large agricultural operations to supply these settlements with food.  Humans have performed some amazing feats of engineering to find and secure water.  Irrigation channels to bring water to agricultural fields were built in the Jordan Valley approximately 8000 years ago. By AD 1300, The Hohokam civilization in central Arizona had built 700 miles of irrigation channels to sustain developing urban centers. The Romans built magnificent aqueducts to supply water to a million residents in Rome.  Water still flows through some of these aqueducts today.  The Assyrians engineered an inverted siphon into their Nineveh Aqueduct 2700 years ago, a construction feat not replicated until 1860 in New York City.  What we have yet to discover is a reliable way to engineer the ocean currents or the wind patterns that push storm clouds through our atmosphere, or the rains that fall on our farm fields or the winter snows that typically cover the Sierra and High Cascade Mountain Ranges.

The United States Geological Survey estimated that in 2005 the United States extracted about 410 billion gallons per day from groundwater (20% of the total) and surface water (80% of the total).  Approximately 50% of the water was used by utilities, 11% for public use, 4% for industrial use, and the remaining 35% for mining, agriculture, and livestock. The scarcity of freshwater has become a crisis in parts of the world including California which produces a vast array of vegetables, fruits, and nuts for our consumption. California far outranks other states in terms of agricultural production so I don’t know what we can expect from a potential future without adequate water for these foods.

Water has been a primary migratory pathway for moving life around our planet.  Islands and continents have been populated by species arriving on clumps of vegetation or logs. Humans constructed papyrus rafts, canoes, skin boats, and wooden sailing ships to journey across waters to settle new lands, transport goods, and pull food from life in the water.  I have a great love of oceans, bays and estuaries.  Part of my life was spent in houses overlooking Chesapeake Bay, Quoddy Narrows (Lubec, northeastern Maine), and Northeast Harbor (Mount Desert Island).  I sailed up the Inside Passage of Alaska on a two month journey to Glacier Bay and Sitka Island visiting various hidden coves and broad bays, and sailed home to Seattle along the edge of the continental shelf.  The 65 foot ketch that I traveled on was a small speck in a large ocean, but a different kind of seafaring journey than the human migrations down the northwest coastal waters in fragile watercraft during the late Pleistocene.

Blog Post by:

Michael Pope, Executive Director

Michael Pope, Blog Writer

Current varieties of domesticated pears likely originated from wild pears that grew in the hills of western Asia.  Pre-historic humans consumed wild pears as evidenced by dried slices of wild pears found in cave dwellings in northern Europe.  Humans have cultivated pears for thousands of years.  The fruit was grown in China for over 3000 years and ancient Romans and Greeks grafted pears to create multiple varieties several hundred years prior to the birth of Christ.  Homer described pears as a “gift of the gods” in The Odyssey and Pliny wrote about stewing pears with honey in his Natural History.  Theophrastus of Eresos (370-286 BC) described horticultural techniques for pears including grafting, pruning, and propagation from seeds and cuttings.  The pear was valued as a symbol of purity, justice, wisdom and comfort in China and Korea.  It was sacred to Isis, the ancient Egyptian goddess of nature and magic, and appears often in Christian cultures as a symbol of love and affection.

There are two principal groups of domesticated pears, the soft-fleshed European Pyrus communis and the crisp Asian pears, P. pyrifolia.  Different varieties of pears were grown in medieval gardens throughout Europe.  During the 17^th and 18^th centuries pear growers in Europe developed many of the ancestors of the varieties that we consume today.  Bosc and Anjou pears originated in France and Belgium, Bartlett pears in England and Comice pears in Angers, France.  A pear sapling transported from England on the ship Arbella in 1630 was planted by John Endicott in Massachusetts and still bears fruit today or 383 years later.  Pears from the Endicott tree are described as coarse and bitter.  In the 1840s, settlers brought many of the varieties grown in the Midwest and eastern seaboard to the west including Oregon.  In 1847, Henderson Luelling transported more than 700 fruit tree saplings to Oregon by ox-team and established a nursery near Milwaukie.  Some of the pear cultivars in his nursery included Barlett, Clapp Favorite, Early Butter, Fall Butter, Pound, Seckel, Vicar of Winkfield, and Winter Nelis.  Parts of central Washington and southern Oregon became major growing areas for pear orchards.  Hood River County is the world’s largest producer of Anjou pears, mostly grown on small family farms.  Pears are Oregon’s number one tree fruit crop and Oregon is the 2^nd largest producer of fresh pears in the United States.  The State of Oregon named the pear as the official State Fruit in 2005.

The Hager Grove Pear Tree near Salem was planted in 1850 and is perhaps the oldest and one of the largest living pear trees in Oregon.  During the past several springs, we noticed two large flowering pear trees adjacent to Mulkey Creek near the Bald Hill Farm house.  The bark on these trees was twisted and riddled with sapsucker holes, yet every fall they produced volumes of small, in-edible (about a 10 on a pucker scale of 1-10) pears of an unknown variety.  We thought that these trees may date to the early 1930s or 40s and asked Dr. Richard Waring if he would help core the trees so we could connect the age to the history of the farm.  We provided two cores to Logan Berner who after much effort determined that the oldest tree may have been planted 125-130 years ago when Grover Cleveland was President and Corvallis had a population of 1500.  The youngest tree was likely planted shortly after the end of World War 1 when Woodrow Wilson was President and the population of Corvallis had grown to 6000 residents.

Bald Hill Farm pear tree planted between 1885-1890